When Andreas Mavroyiannis was appointed the Greek Cypriots’ lead negotiator with the Turkish side of the island this month, many in Brussels took note. Mavroyiannis is not only Cyprus’ former ambassador to the EU, but he served as the island’s EU minister during its eventful EU presidency last year.

Although the Cypriot presidency received mixed reviews, thanks in part to ongoing upheaval back in Nicosia surrounding the country’s then-unfinished bailout, Mavroyiannis was widely viewed as a pro, winning praise in Brussels for his handling of highly-tendentious negotiations over the EU’s €1tn seven-year budget.

So if Mavroyiannis could handle 27 warring EU heads of state, surely his appointment was a sign of new Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades’ seriousness in tacking the 40-year division of the island, some reasoned. Anastasiades was one of the few Greek Cypriot politicians, after all, who backed the 2004 Annan Plan to reunify the island, and many EU officials have hoped the economic crisis brought on by the €10bn bailout might bring new momentum to finding a solution to the frozen conflict.

Well, not everyone agrees with that assessment – least of all Osman Ertug, the Turkish Cypriot official who will be Mavroyiannis’ chief interlocutor if and when negotiations reconvene. Read more

Brussels and Beijing appear to be nearing a settlement in a trade fight over solar panels that is the EU’s biggest ever anti-dumping case – based on the more than €20bn in Chinese-made solar products shipped to the bloc in 2011. Sometime on Friday afternoon, EU officials are expecting to learn whether or not their counterparts in Beijing have taken their latest offer.

In theory, the two sides have until August 6th to haggle over a deal. After that date, provisional duties imposed by the EU will jump from about 11 per cent to an average of 47 per cent. The reality is that they have probably already missed that deadline, according to diplomats, given the amount of legwork that Brussels must do to translate an agreement and circulate it among national governments. Hence, the next few days are crucial. Read more

Among the EU’s less successful policies, the one governing biofuels looms as a particular case study in unintended consequences.

Five years ago, member states agreed to binding targets requiring each country to derive 10 per cent of all transport fuel from renewables by 2020. Those targets were meant to speed the adoption of environmentally-friendly biofuels and were part of a broader campaign by Brusselsto claim the lead in the fight against global warming.

These days, that policy is a mess. The increased demand for crop-based biofuels – made from corn, rape and soya, for example – has been blamed for a surge in world food prices. It also appears to contribute to deforestation as farmers in far corners of the world chop down rainforests to plant biofuel crops.

The EU is now seeking to correct that. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, made a new proposal last year that aims to phase out crop-based biofuels in favour of cleaner ones derived from waste products and algae, among other substances. The European parliament’s environment committee last week voted through its own version of the draft legislation.

But it seems even the revised biofuels policy may have its own unintended consequences, including a brewing fight between Europe’s oleochemicals industry – the folks who use processed animal fats to produce everything from lubricants to lipstick – and their suppliers. Read more

Politics in Brussels can verge on the absurd. As a case in point, we bring you the bizarre tale of how Greek Stalinists seemingly helped rescue European fund managers from a bonus cap, then deployed a form of Brussels magic that lets you vote against something, then for it.

Before we start, it is worth mentioning that this blog is partly intended as a way to fully lay out the evidence and address accusations that the FT launched a “sycophantic attack” on the Greek Communist party. Read more

In an interview with five European newspapers published Thursday, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who heads the committee of eurozone finance ministers, said his eurogroup will need to look at whether Greece needs additional bailout aid in April 2014.

This will surprise some members of the troika, particularly the International Monetary Fund, who were pushing for a reckoning much more quickly amid signs the €172bn second Greek bailout is running out of cash much sooner than anticipated.

Once the €3bn in EU aid contained in a new €4.8bn tranche approved this week is paid out, total EU outlays will reach €133.6bn — out of a total €144.6bn committed (the IMF puts up the rest). So just €11bn left in the EU’s coffers. Further evidence that cash is leaving too quickly is contained in the latest report on Greece’s rescue prepared by the European Commission, which our friends and rivals at Reuters obtained and helpfully posted for everyone to see.

As Brussels Blog noted earlier, there is no more EU cash left in the programme for the second half of next year, even though the bailout was originally supposed to contain enough until the end of 2014. But this chart in the new report makes clear that cash may run out even quicker than that: Not only is the third and fourth quarters of 2014 completely unfunded, now there’s only €1.5bn left for the second quarter, too. Read more

A few weeks ago, the EU agreed an historic overhaul of its troubled common fisheries policy, setting binding deadlines to end decades of over-fishing that have depleted stocks from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.

But just when it seemed safe to go back in the water, the European parliament’s fisheries committee threatened to take a bite out of the reform on Wednesday. By a 12 to 11 margin, the committee approved an amendment allowing the use of up to €1.6bn in EU funds to help build new fishing boats.

The subsidies fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that the EU’s 83,000-vessel fleet is already far too large, and in need of a drastic cut – some say by half – in order to allow stocks to recover.

“For anyone with a brain this is completely outrageous and very difficult to understand,” said Markus Knigge, a fisheries advisor to the Pew Charitable Trust, citing estimates that the money could result in 19,000 new boats. Read more

Barnier, standing at right, may be in for another tussle with Germany's Wolfgang Schäuble.

With Brussels gearing up for tomorrow’s much-anticipated unveiling of the European Commission’s proposal for a new EU agency to take over responsibility for bailing out and restructuring failing banks, we thought it was as good a time as any to post the outline of the plan presented to commissioners last month.

As we reported in today’s dead-tree edition of the FT, the Commission’s legislative proposal that is to be agreed at Wednesday’s meeting of the college is not much different from the eight-page blueprint (read it here) presented by Michel Barnier, the commissioner in charge of financial regulations, and José Manuel Barroso, the commission president.

Fellow Brussels Blogger Alex Barker has written extensively about the outline both for the FT and the Brussels Blog, but it will serve as a good comparison to what comes out tomorrow since the German government has made clear it is unhappy with key elements of the original outline – particularly its contention that a “network of national resolution authorities and funds” is “not sufficient”. Read more

If there were an award for the most powerful group in Brussels that nobody outside the EU bubble has ever heard of, it would probably go to something called Coreper, which is short for comité des représentants permanents – or the committee of permanent representatives.

Its fancy name belies its simple makeup: the 28 ambassadors sent by the EU’s member states to represent them in Brussels. But don’t let that simplicity fool you. In many respects, their powers rival national ministers.

Their weekly (at least) meetings set the course for EU summits and bargains on every piece of European legislation, from budgets to banking union to border security, and many EU perm reps participate in cabinet meetings back home. Indeed, they sit in for national ministers when they can’t attend regular Brussels gatherings.

But Coreper’s relative anonymity means its members are not widely known at home and it may be why something else has gone largely unnoticed: one of the largest departures of senior Coreper ambassadors in recent memory. By Brussels Blog’s count, this summer will see three of the committee’s six longest-serving members – including its vice-dean – either retire or move onto other postings. Read more

What are the options if Portugal can’t make it? Back in February, when eurozone finance ministers were weighing whether to give both Ireland and Portugal more time to pay off their bailout loans, EU officials drew up a memo that included a section titled “Options beyond the current programmes and the role of the ESM”.

Although it’s over four months old, it hasn’t been made public before and it offers some newly-relevant insights into what path Portugal may take if it can’t stand on its own by May 2014. Read more

But to those committed to the European project, the news is not all bad. As Martin Schulz, the parliament president, noted in an interview on Sunday, the revelations – if proven true – offered an unintended measure of validation for the EU on the international stage. Read more

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Notes from the EU

About this blog

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Welcome. This blog covers everything from the European Union's foreign and economic policies to the fortunes of its political leaders - as well as the more light-hearted aspects of life in Europe.

The authors

Peter Spiegel is the FT's Brussels bureau chief. He returned to the FT in August 2010 after spending five years covering foreign policy and national security issues from Washington for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He first joined the FT in 1999 covering business regulation and corporate crime in its Washington bureau, before spending four years covering military affairs and the defence industry in London and Washington.

Alex Barker is EU correspondent, covering the single market, financial regulation and competition. He was formerly an FT political correspondent in the UK and joined the FT in 2005.

Duncan Robinson is the FT's Brussels correspondent, covering internet and telecommunications regulation, justice, employment and migration as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He joined the FT from the New Statesman in 2011